by Nathan Hawke
‘Then I will.’ He shuffled closer. His hand stayed pressed to her heart, his eyes snaking past her to where Arda and Nadric and the children lay. Jelira stepped closer. She tipped back her head until the tips of their noses touched together.
‘If the forkbeards win, I don’t want to die alone.’
‘Nor do I.’ He reached his injured arm around her and pulled her closer still.
‘Forkbeards!’ A sudden shout split the rumble of snores and echoed through the cave. Reddic and Jelira jumped apart, looking about in panic as the shout came again: ‘Forkbeards! Forkbeards are coming!’ It ran through the caves like fire and suddenly Marroc everywhere were scrambling for their shields and their spears, jamming their helms on their heads while the few who had mail struggled into their shirts or hauberks. Reddic stood frozen. He stared at Jelira and she stared back, and then an old Marroc grabbed him by the arm and Jelira nodded and turned away.
‘Live!’ she cried after him.
‘This way, boy.’ The old Marroc ran up a slope at the side of the cavern and into the passage that led outside to a tiny valley beside a stream. A dozen Marroc soldiers were already there, clustered together with their shields held up and their spears wavering towards the night. Out in the snow Reddic saw figures moving in the moonlight. He couldn’t tell how many there were. As he watched, more Marroc came in ones and twos, running and out of breath.
‘Marroc!’ A forkbeard voice pierced the chill. ‘Traitors and rebels! This is your king. I’d ask you to throw down your arms but we both know that you won’t. Good enough. I don’t want you to. I don’t know how many of you are in there, but I haven’t brought many men. Most of them simply couldn’t be bothered with you. So I’m going to sit here and watch. Come and get me if you have the heart. If you have women and children with you, you may send them out. They’ll not be harmed. They may go back to their homes.’
In the semi-darkness figures formed into a line, a dozen of them, maybe a few more, but still less than half the number of Marroc now at the mouth of the caves. They came on slowly.
‘Those aren’t forkbeards.’ The old soldier who’d dragged him out frowned and let go of his arm. Reddic peered. ‘No spears. No shields.’
The moonlight caught them for a moment. The old Marroc gasped and Reddic felt himself wilt inside. The men coming towards him were clad in iron from head to toe like the devil that had led the last assault on Witches’ Reach. His mouth felt dry. He took a step back and the other Marroc around him did the same. He could taste the fear in the air. They began to back into the cave and it was all he could do not to turn and run. Iron devils. Men who couldn’t be killed. Already dead, some said, but they said it in fright-filled whispers. Then shouts rang out from the passage behind him too, and screams, and a moment later a half-dressed Marroc bolted out of the tunnel. ‘Shadewalkers!’ Maybe he didn’t see the iron devils or maybe he didn’t care. He ran straight at them. ‘Modris preserve us!’
The iron devils broke into a run, slow at first but building speed. The fleeing Marroc swerved from their path but one ironskin veered from the rest and cut him to the ground. The others charged in silence, each with an axe in one hand and a sword in the other, straight at the mouth of the cave. Faster and faster they came, while the Marroc soldiers wavered, wilted and then broke and turned and ran back into the tunnel before a single blow was struck, and Reddic ran with them, clutching his arm to his chest, and they were screaming in terror, only now there were Marroc fleeing the other way too, getting in their way. Someone barged Reddic from behind. He stumbled and tripped and fell as the iron devils crashed into the fleeing Marroc and began to cut them down. A man fell beside him, the back of his head split open by an axe. Another Marroc came the other way, bellowing with rage and fear, battering the iron devils back for a moment before they cut him to pieces. Reddic pulled himself free. Between the pressing walls of the tunnel someone trod on his leg, then his head. He managed to stagger to his feet but he could hardly see a thing and all he could hear were shrieks of terror, and there were men all around him, thrashing to get past each other but with nowhere to go. He dropped his shield and pushed forward in the dark. Men kicked and cursed him, and he shouted at them to turn back because there was nothing waiting for them but the iron devils and at least a man could outpace a shadewalker, but no one heard. He pushed his way out of the passage at last to where the tunnel opened into the cathedral of stone and jumped down off the ledge, wincing as his ankle hit the cave floor below and as he jarred his damaged arm. Inside the caves he could hardly see a thing. The only light came from those few candles that hadn’t been tipped over and trodden out, yet sounds echoed everywhere, the rattle of iron on stone, the hiss of the shadewalkers, the scratch of steel, the shrill screams of men trapped with nowhere to go. ‘Arda! Jelira!’ A candle lit up a cluster of spires near where they’d been resting and he stumbled towards it. A lurching shape loomed at him out of the darkness. He yelped and jumped away but it was only a Marroc soldier with his arm almost hacked off at the shoulder, staggering in blind agony. ‘Arda!’
‘Reddic!’ He heard Jelira but he couldn’t see her. Another shape moved across the darkness in front of him. A shade-walker this time. He didn’t see it, didn’t see the swing of the sword until the very last moment, too late to do much except twist and lean back. The point of the shadewalker’s sword scraped down the front of his mail hard enough to spark, hard enough for his chest to feel as though he’d been ripped open. He tripped over a ridge in the stone floor and landed hard on his shoulder. His damaged arm exploded with pain and he screamed. The shadewalker came after him. He scrabbled back to his feet and stumbled away. Anywhere.
‘Reddic!’ A deeper voice. Arda this time. He almost walked into a stone column, and then an arm grabbed him and pulled him and suddenly he was in among a small huddle of Marroc pressed tight against a cluster of the stone spires. Arda. He recognised her smell. And Nadric and Jelira and the children. ‘Stay still and be quiet, you daft bugger!’
‘Stay still?’ His arm was agony.
‘Yes!’
‘We have to leave! We have to run!’
Arda gripped his shoulder so hard it hurt. ‘Run where, boy? Now be still.’
Jelira’s hand took his. Squeezed tight and didn’t let go.
20
THE WIZARD OF AULIA
Oribas ducked under the shadewalker’s sword and threw a handful of salt at its face. It let out an unearthly scream and reeled back. He shoved a flaming torch at it, burning it some more. Salt and fire and ice, all those things together had once stilled a shadewalker long enough for a stab of cold iron through the heart to finish it. ‘Addic!’ He looked desperately for the other Marroc but all he could see was the flicker of torches in among the trees. A handful. Everyone else had fled.
A heavy stone fizzed past his head and hit the shade-walker in the face and suddenly the air was filled with the stench of fish, and Oribas understood it hadn’t been a stone at all but a pot of oil. He rammed his torch at the reeling shadewalker again, held it there until the oil started to burn and then stumbled back as flames engulfed the monster’s face and chest.
‘Iron! Cold iron!’ Oribas took another handful of salt from his bag for when the flames started to fade. ‘Addic!’
‘Oribas!’ Footsteps crunched the snow behind him but it wasn’t Addic. Achista had a shield in one hand and a sword in the other – not that she had much idea of what to do with a sword any more than he did but she held it anyway. ‘Everyone else has run. You need to come.’
Oribas shook his head. ‘We can put this one to rest.’ The flames were dying now. The shadewalker had stopped struggling and stood swaying from side to side. It stank of burned flesh and scorched fish, and when Oribas threw his second handful of salt into its face, it collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. Oribas jumped on it at once, pulling at the mail coat it wore. ‘Help me with this!’
Achista recoiled and shook her head. He understood. There was s
omething about the touch of cold dead flesh on the skin. Oribas had cut up a dozen bodies in his youth, long ago when he’d been learning his arts, and yet it still made his skin crawl, the clammy touch of the dead. The shadewalkers felt the same only they weren’t quite dead, which made it worse. He pulled the mail up around the shadewalker’s hips and then rolled it over onto its back and pulled further. The dark was a blessing. The last time he’d done this had been in daylight. What he’d seen he still carried with him, clear as yesterday.
He had to push hard to get at the creature’s ribs. He couldn’t get the mail any further without taking the whole coat off. ‘Can you finish it?’ The last time he’d done this the shadewalker’s mail hadn’t been so long. Easier to pull back.
Achista shook her head. She backed away. ‘No. I can’t. Not one of them.’
‘A knife. Please. Iron.’ Oribas reached out a hand. Achista pressed a haft into his palm. He levered back the mail and tried to get the knife as straight as he could over the space between the ribs where the shadewalker’s heart ought to be. He almost had it and then paused. ‘You have the courage to stand this close – why not one step closer still? I need both my hands to hold back the mail and that leaves me with none for the knife.’ A half-truth, but there was a better reason: here was Achista the Huntress, the woman who’d led the Hundred Heroes into Witches’ Reach and held it for a month while forkbeard bodies piled up around its walls and she shouldn’t be afraid of a thing like this. ‘You once stood and faced a forkbeard army with a sword you could barely use, my love. This is a dead man. Nothing more.’
‘A dead man that lives.’
‘I have stilled him.’
She took a step closer. ‘I remember the forkbeards. You started throwing lumps of snow at them.’ She laughed, high and nervous, and Oribas chuckled too, even with a dead man under his fingers.
‘I could not think of anything else.’ He knelt down by the body again and put the knife in place as best he could. ‘Help me.’
She knelt beside him, shaking badly, face screwed up in fear though she’d stood and faced death from the forkbeards more times than he could count and he’d never once seen her afraid. Sad, perhaps, and often angry, but never afraid like this. ‘It isn’t right. It’s a thing spurned by the gods themselves. Touched by the Weeping God’s tears.’
‘In this land it is a monster, Achista, nothing more. And I have slain many monsters.’ The gods of the Marroc weren’t the same as the old gods of Aulia and the shadewalkers came from across the mountains, not from here. He took her hand and put it over his own on the hilt of her knife, took her other hand and put it there too and then pulled at the shadewalker’s mail. ‘Close your eyes if you wish. It will go in easily. I’ll count to thr—’
But she pushed down before he even finished and the iron blade slid as easily as he’d said between the creature’s ribs. Oribas let go of its mail, grabbed Achista and pulled her away. ‘Open your eyes. Look! Look!’ The shadewalker was disintegrating at their feet, all the years of death and decay that had been held at bay let loose at once. Achista gagged and doubled over and threw up. The stink from the corpse was terrible. Oribas took up her knife when it was done and handed it back. ‘How many were there?’ he asked, but Achista only shrugged.
Later, after the shadewalkers had gone, the Marroc slowly came together again, calling out to each other. Dozens of the creatures had passed through the wood. Not as many as a hundred but perhaps half that number, and they’d walked with a purpose, and it was only chance that had taken them close to the Marroc camp and the Marroc had come out to kill them, thinking that they were forkbeards.
It was only much later that Oribas realised where the shadewalkers were all going with such purpose. To the Devil’s Caves, but by then it was too late to do anything but bury the dead.
Reddic cringed. A shadewalker was standing right in front of him. Not that he could see it because the caves were now black as pitch, the last of the candles burned out or crushed under iron boots. The shouts and screams and the clash of arms had long since died away, fallen to a dwindle of distant wails as the last men in the caves were winkled out of their hiding places. The shadewalkers were searching and they had eyes that pierced the utter dark and saw some light that ordinary men did not. And now the shadewalker was there, in front of him, and if Reddic reached out with his sword, he was certain he could have touched it. When it stood still it was silent, no hoarse rasping breaths to give it away, but he’d heard its feet scraping on the stone as it came closer and closer. Heard it come up to the line of salt that Arda had lain across the stone floor around where they hid.
For a long time it didn’t move. Then he heard a clink of mail and more scraping as it turned away. He started to breathe again. It was the fourth to have found them. They showed no sign of leaving. He went back to rocking slowly back and forth, holding his arm, biting back the tears.
Oribas and Achista and her Hundred Heroes were most of the way to the caves when the Lhosir caught them, galloping up the road in the dead of night, guided by the moon. The sounds gave their coming away before anyone saw them, but they came fast. The Marroc threw themselves off the road among the grass and stones at the edge of the Isset and lay flat, praying to Modris that the forkbeards wouldn’t see, but Modris wasn’t listening. The Lhosir stopped a little way up the road and dismounted and came back. A score of them, thereabouts, not that many more than the Marroc themselves and so the Marroc got to their feet and dusted themselves down and readied themselves for a fight. Yet only one of the Lhosir carried a shield and wore the dark bulk of forkbeard furs. The rest of them . . . In the moonlight they gleamed. They wore metal. They were the Lhosir Fateguard, iron devils to the Marroc, but Oribas knew them better still. Shadewalkers that hadn’t yet lost their minds. Children of the thing he’d seen in the crypt under Witches’ Reach. He reached for his salt as the ironskins moved closer, steady and cautious while the forkbeard stayed in their midst with his shield held in front of him. ‘Well, well. I was after your friends in the Devils’ Caves tonight, but I’ll thank the Maker-Devourer for giving you to me too. Throw down your swords, Marroc. Give yourselves to me and I’ll show mercy.’
Beside Oribas, Achista tensed. She hissed. ‘Sixfingers! It’s Sixfingers himself!’ She whipped an arrow out of her quiver and drew back her bow. ‘Sixfingers!’ she cried. ‘The one with the shield! Kill him and the forkbeards are beaten right here!’ The arrow flew straight and true at the forkbeard’s face and Oribas didn’t see how any man could move so quickly, yet the Lhosir king did. His shield jerked up and caught the arrow squarely in its centre. The other Marroc jumped up and howled and ran at him but the iron devils stepped into their path with a casual disdain. Spears and swords struck sparks off their armour but nothing more, and then their own swords and axes fell, hooking shields aside, striking hard into mail, searching out hands and arms and necks and faces and all those places where men who weren’t clad in iron showed their skin. Oribas sprinkled salt in a wide circle. Achista let another arrow fly. It caught one of the iron devils in the face, went straight through the bars of the mask he wore over his eyes and struck deep into whatever skin and bone lay beneath. It barely flinched. Oribas scattered more salt.
The Marroc turned and ran now and the iron devils chased them, all but a few who stayed by their king. Achista loosed another arrow at Sixfingers and again his shield caught it. She turned to Oribas, held out a hand to pull him away and then froze. Addic was staggering, hobbling from a terrible slash across his calf and there was a Fateguard right behind him already raising an axe. Achista let Oribas go, screamed and hurled herself at it, smashing the ironskin sideways so hard that the two of them crashed to the ground.
‘Addic!’ Oribas darted out of his circle, took Addic by the hand and pulled him inside.
And then stopped and stared, aghast. The Fateguard had Achista. The Lhosir king held up a hand, stopping one as he lifted a sword to kill her. ‘Lhosir don’t make war on women and
children. Hold her still!’
Two of the ironskins held her arms and her shoulders. Sixfingers stood in front of her. ‘How many Marroc women fight with their men? I’ve seen a few and I’ve heard of another one. They call her the Huntress. Is that who you are? I should wring your neck.’ Ten figures now stood around Achista, nine clad in iron and armed with swords and axes, the tenth a king, and Oribas carried no sword or spear or shield, but he ran at the iron devils howling like a dervish. In each clenched fist he carried salt which he threw in their faces, and for a moment Achista was free and the Lhosir king was right in front of him.
‘And her Aulian wizard. I should have known. I’m not like them, Aulian.’ He drew back his sword. Achista barged Oribas out of the way. She whipped out a knife and lunged, but Sixfingers only laughed at her and slammed her with his shield, knocking her down again. Oribas threw one last handful of salt into the air and bolted back to Addic, dragging Achista with him. She tried to haul Addic to his feet so they might all run together but Addic couldn’t move.
She set her jaw and turned to face the iron devils and their king.
‘A fine gesture.’ Addic shook his head. ‘And now what? The river, Aulian. If you can make the river you might escape. Run, both of you! Run!’
Oribas stared at the iron-skinned men of the Fateguard. ‘Did you see any bows on their horses?’ Addic looked at Oribas as though he’d gone mad but Oribas started to laugh. He stood beside Achista and put a hand on her shoulder and faced the Lhosir king and his Fateguard. ‘I won’t run from you. None of us will.’ He leaned closer to Achista and hissed in her ear, ‘Stay close. He cannot touch us. Trust me.’
